The Husbands and Wives Club: A Year in the Life of a Couples Therapy Group

Prologue

For some years now, I’ve read with an eye, or ear, to who gets it right about marriage. This wasn’t conscious much of the time, other than perhaps in my predilection for fiction that is character driven, spinning on the axis of human relationship rather than plot. But as a result, a fair number of my books, the novels mostly, have at least one or two scribbled effusions like, My God, that’s it! Or, Exactly right. Or just check marks being, in the world of magazine editing from which I come, the indication of appreciation for a particular word, sentence, or idea—restrained, but no less the loving for it.

In magazines, my niche has become something like feminism, psychology, and sex, and the politics thereof. (My first big piece in that realm, published in 1999 in the now-defunct Mirabella magazine, was a ten-thousand-word opus on female sexual desire and the evolution of sex and marital therapy.) When you cover such topics for magazines, the peg, or news hook, is usually the latest therapist-guru or how-to book, and over time I began to see patterns in the way relationships were conceived—and to be able to detect ideas that were richer, fresher, and potentially more useful to readers. The more I delved into modern psychological thinking and research, the more, too, I was drawn to earlier sources: to Freud and to other psychoanalysts, to family therapy pioneers of the 1960s and 1970s.

Which brings me to this book. The idea for it, or rather for The New York Times Magazine piece that inspired it, came now nearly five years ago. As I remember it, I’d just read Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters and admired how she’d nailed the choppy river of dialogue, spoken and unspoken, that perpetually runs between spouses.

Oh, did I forget to mention it? I’m married, eleven years, and so an expert in how one couple constantly communicates—even when, or maybe especially when, we think we’re not. I wanted to write nonfiction about marriage at different developmental stages the way Fox wrote fiction: close-up, textured, real. I knew it wouldn’t work to just interview husbands and wives. Even if I spoke to people repeatedly, so that they perhaps began to open up, it would be difficult to capture the feeling of their relationships, the split-second shifting of mood and intention. Although for an earlier book on health care and poverty I’d been a journalistic fly on the wall, hung out with various members of one family hour upon hour for several years, I couldn’t imagine replicating that with couples. Too much downtime, which, granted, there was a fair amount of in my reporting for the health care book, but there also were relevant events, such as visits from home health nurses, hospital stays, and doctor’s appointments. What was I going to do, ask some couple to call me before they fought, or made tender love?

In any event, I never seriously considered that. My mind quickly went to couples therapy because I specifically wanted to explore how couples live—and live through (or not)—their troubles. My husband and I saw a marriage therapist together and found it moderately helpful, and, as I’ve suggested, I was interested in therapy as an entity of its own, its theory and practice. Summing it up in a sentence, my overall question became: How does marriage work to tear people down—leaving them feeling bitter or diminished, dulled or lost—and if that process can be interrupted, if a therapist can lift spouses out of the muck of their own making, how does it work?

After I decided I wanted to follow a therapy group, I contacted several people who run them for couples, among them a Philadelphia therapist named Judith Coché. Over coffee near my office at ELLE magazine in Manhattan, I told Coché I wanted to spend a year attending her group and also have permission to interview her and the couples outside of it, possibly in their homes. I’d try to faithfully represent the members and her thinking and technique, but neither she nor her group would have any say over what I wrote. If I was at all confused about what she was trying to do with the group, I’d ask her about it. Coché was cautiously excited. Confidentiality is an ethical mandate for therapists, and to decide to stretch it for an outside observer, certainly a journalist, wasn’t something she could do lightly. Yet here was an opportunity to educate the public about the benefits of marriage therapy, and the group form in particular. (I’m sure she didn’t mind the attention, either, though after three decades as a therapist, she was professionally well established.)

After reading much of my work—and, without telling me, contacting former subjects of my magazine pieces—Coché broached the project with the new group she was forming. It was to include three couples who were continuing from the year before and two new ones. They’d meet one weekend a month, for one or two six-hour sessions. The groups used to meet biweekly, but Coché increasingly found that getting both members of five separate couples, many with children, to show up so frequently was impossible. The monthly sessions would also allow people to enroll who lived beyond the immediate Philadelphia area, and in the group I’d follow, the couples drove as long as three hours to get to Coché’s office in Center City Philadelphia or one she has near her summer cottage on the Jersey shore.

Some members were enthusiastic about my observing, others agnostic, a few quite nervous, Coché told me. All were willing to entertain the idea. Coché then arranged a conference call in which the group could ask me questions. Their main concerns, not surprising, hinged on confidentiality, and I agreed to use middle names or nicknames, according to the New York Times protocol. I told them I’d protect their identities as much as possible, but I wouldn’t make up details about them. I might leave a few things out—for example, I don’t say in the book where anyone lives—but with one exception (which I’ll explain later), I do not concoct alternate professions or other personal information. I continue to believe that when I’m writing nonfiction, it shouldn’t be fictional, so in this book I followed fairly conventional journalistic standards. I didn’t compress or otherwise alter the chronology of events, and the quotes are actual. I audiotaped and later transcribed all of the group sessions (and did the same for outside interviews).

Okay, after all my lofty assurances, the exception: My agreement with the group was that anything they said during the sessions or in interviews was fair game for the magazine article. One of the five couples refused to participate, however, unless I left out a central conflict. I told my Times editor, and we agreed to the condition, partly because I hadn’t expected the pair to play a major role in the article. And in fact, I only ended up having space to tell one couple’s story in the magazine. That led to the writing of the book. Usually, when I publish a magazine piece, even though I’ve moaned to my editor all along about needing more space, I feel finished—I’ve used all the good stuff and left the rest on the cutting-room floor. This time that wasn’t the case. The dynamics and problems of the other couples were equally fascinating. Each seemed to represent a distinctive shade on the wide spectrum of discontent that periodically darkens marriage.

A book also would offer a chance to tease out the thinking of the people whom I consider, in their insight and command of the nuances of human experience, to be philosophers of monogamy, as well as to expand on the critique of couples therapy begun in the Times. Vast amounts of social science about therapy’s effectiveness—and marriage in general—have accumulated in the past thirty to forty years, so there was plenty to scrutinize. (To this end, I told Coché she wasn’t the only therapist I’d be interviewing.) I was curious, in particular, about the reliability of highly publicized studies that predict which marriages will succeed or fail based on observing couples interact for short periods of time.

So, to do the book, I returned to the couple whose problem I’d agreed to redact. Could I write more fully about them now? This time they agreed, sort of. They’d participate but only if I changed some identifying details. I did so, deciding that their struggle was more important to a book on marriage than an absolutely accurate biographical portrayal.

One question I’ve been asked frequently is how I affected people in the group—if at all—and how they affected me. To begin with, I was rather quiet. Analogizing my role to that of a student intern, Coché urged me to ask questions or make observations in the moment, but I was slow to take her up on that. I didn’t want the group members to mistake me for one of their own as opposed to someone who would ultimately write about them; I assumed any factual confusion I had would clear up with time, anyway. And while my head buzzed with reactions and thoughts based on my forays into the psychology of marriage and my relationship with my husband, I wasn’t at all sure my comments would be welcome or helpful.

Gradually, however, the group and I became more comfortable with each other. I began to ask questions, make jokes, and let my emotions show somewhat. Which is not to say I had myself under perfect control: One time, I burst into tears, stricken by a story recounted by a woman in the group. Coché later told me not to be worried by my crying; the group was a little low on the affect side, she said, and I’d added a jolt of feeling.

The members themselves, I sensed, were happy to have me join in a little, and some eventually said that they appreciated my questions, even my bluntness. When the Times story was published, one member (who was mentioned only briefly in the magazine) was upset because something I’d written hurt her relationship with a relative. But apart from that, no one ever told me or Coché that my participation was a liability. That doesn’t mean no one privately believed this: Once the group agreed to have me there, they were pretty much stuck. I guess someone could have started a campaign to oust me, but that probably would have been more trouble than it was worth. As yet another member told me, You weren’t my focus. My marriage was.

I also related an occasional anecdote from my own life. Early on, I did it mostly when I thought somebody could use an ally; for example, once it seemed like a certain man was being left to believe that no one in the group ever became explosively angry, and I let it be known that I could be a terror. Later, I offered a few revelations about myself and my marriage that, while expressing solidarity, also betrayed vulnerability. While we never dwelled on me, it was a relief, I suppose, to unburden myself.

The usual concern for journalists, or anthropologists, when they become part of the action is that their report may end up being skewed because their presence influenced the subjects. For a therapy group, the matter seems tricky to gauge, however. Each group is idiosyncratic and the measurement of cause and effect relatively murky and subjective. It’s true that part of what I try to do in the book is trace the arc of the couples’ changes, so I don’t reject the idea that there are turning points. Few, if any, of them, however, could be traced to the intervention of a single member—except perhaps Coché—and all were rooted in what came before.

Since I cried at one point, it’s probably obvious that I came to care about the people I sat with each month—for a year, then two. I told them when I started that even though their real names weren’t being used, they might hate the way they were portrayed. I wouldn’t put words in their mouths, but what I chose to concentrate on, what I noticed, would say as much about me as them. Yet I wasn’t the one who was to be laid out on the page; they were. The group accepted this, but I don’t think you can understand what it feels like to be written about until it happens.

So I really, really don’t want to hurt anyone in the group, to have them suffer because of anything I’ve written. I am deeply grateful to them for allowing me into their circle. But I’m not giving them veto power over the book’s contents, either. Reporting requires a measure of ruthlessness. When the playwright Horton Foote died in 2009, Times reviewer Ben Brantley had this to say about him: I think he loved all his characters . . . but he was too honest to let any of them off the hook. Yes, I’m writing nonfiction, not fiction—and yes, I’m no Horton Foote—but the best I can hope is that Coché and the ten people in the group will know, because of what I’ve written or in spite of it, that I feel love for them.

CHAPTER 1

Who Would Submit to This?

The emotional intimacy, Marie is telling her husband, Clem, and, unavoidably, the therapist and three other couples in the room, "needs to come before the physical intimacy."

Okay, Clem says. His tone is chipper—so much of marriage is in the tone. This is the first meeting of a couples therapy group that will convene one or two days a month for the next year, and Clem doesn’t sound discouraged by this seemingly unoriginal request from his wife. (Women need to feel close before they can have sex, blah, blah, blah.) To the contrary: Clem is hearing it as a revelation, something he can do to make things better. His wife of twenty-two years is sitting catty-corner to him in a turquoise T-shirt with a tropical fish swimming across her chest; but her slim ankles are demurely crossed, the resting pose of one of those fifties starlets who swished around on-screen in full skirts, sheer hose, and kitten heels. So what if Marie is only wearing a loose T-shirt, cotton shorts, and white Keds? Clem first met her in college, when she was eighteen, and her legs are good, long for a woman of her modest height and round figure.

The therapist who runs the group, Philadelphia psychologist Judith Coché, opened the proceedings by instructing each of the four couples (there is a fifth, but they had to miss the first session for a long-scheduled vacation) to huddle together and tell each other what they wanted to accomplish in the next year. Quiet murmuring, periodically ripped by a seagull’s screech, filled the room. Located in a town called Stone Harbor on the Jersey shore, this is what Coché calls her beach office, or The Weekend Retreat, according to the hand-painted, hand-carved sign hanging on the front door. In Philadelphia, she works from the Coché Center. Both offices are retrofitted condos whose names confer a bit more grandeur than is evident, in part because hearty self-promotion seems reflexive for Coché. A few colleagues have criticized her for it in the past, she once told me. Then she shrugged, as if indifferent to their attitude or just puzzled by it.

Stone Harbor’s business district consists of five blocks of ice cream parlors and souvenir emporiums, and Coché’s office is just off the main strip, on the third floor of an anonymous low-rise with a cleaning service at the street level. The building backs up against a small bay, lined with vacation homes and a bustling boat-and-float-rental business. Standing on the balcony during a break in the group, all the activity can make you wistful—those people are having so much fun!

Back inside the office, the decor is insistently pleasant. On the bookshelves, ersatz beach paraphernalia is interspersed with pop and academic psychology titles; the galley kitchen where Coché prepares lunch for the group is papered in factory-issue floral; and a small Zen sand garden sits on the coffee table in the room where the therapy is conducted, next to a box of tissues.

Cutting against the anodyne mood, Coché had cued up a crackly old recording of Cole Porter singing I Get a Kick Out of You as the couples trailed in for the 10 a.m. start time. Lighthearted inspiration? Maybe. But this is a couples therapy group, a setting in which one might expect to find the gross, destructive mutual raids on personality that often form marriages, as the British writer Rebecca West observed. If you were so situated, Cole Porter’s witty professions of infatuation might sting rather than amuse, remind you of the adoration you were unrequitedly craving.

Marie and Clem, both in their mid-forties, are the first pair to volunteer to report their goals back to the group, who’ve settled into a rough circle. I’m on the periphery, my eyes darting among the couples, except when someone meets my gaze. Then I quickly look away. I feel voyeuristic, intrusive—and definitely disinclined to take Coché’s advice to speak when I have something to say. There are five couples—ten separate people—who have one or two days a month to get their say, at a cost of about $6,000 for the year. That may sound like forever, but troubled marriages are small countries of love and hate, of confusion and icy clarity, of guilt and recrimination, of running to and from. Picking across the rugged terrain takes time.

Surveying the circle, Marie is sitting with her back to the room’s windows, which are cracked open to let in a chilly breeze off the bay. She’s chosen one of two deep, upholstered chairs, and her arms are loosely crossed, resting on a pillow lying in her lap. Clem is a few feet away, sitting a little stiffly on one end of a couch. It could be that he’s afraid to brush up against Rachael, whom he’s just met. She and her husband, Michael, both in their mid-thirties, are sharing the couch with Clem. They’re practically on top of each other—well, not really, but their thighs are touching and Michael’s arm is thrown across the back of the couch, his hand resting companionably on his wife’s shoulder.

In a chair next to Michael is Mark, the group’s most emphatically grown-up member. An executive in his early fifties, he is six feet three inches tall and speaks in a deep baritone. When he opens his mouth, you want to sit up straight, smooth your skirt, and pay attention. His wife at his side, Sue Ellen, is about a foot shorter, and takes up space with her silence. The mother of three almost grown sons, she does not come off as angry so much as very, very contained. She’s wearing a soft taupe sweater, trimmed in green velvet, and a pearl necklace; she spends the morning holding her small zebra-skin purse in her lap.

Having rolled her black leather desk chair over to the circle, Coché is perched just above everyone else, her preferred position since it gives her the best vantage point from which to conduct the group. Conduct is Coché’s word for the way she approaches her job. A tall, broad-shouldered brunette with a taste in clothes that is a cross between tailored elegance and earth mother, she is commanding, almost showily confident. She has season tickets to the Philadelphia Orchestra, she has told me, and she always sits at the back of the stage behind the players, so she can watch the maestro work. Creating a sense of performance, it’s really inspiring to people, she says. It gives them something to hold on to when everything else is falling apart.

What traces of vulnerability Coché does display in the group are oddly riveting. Like when she folds her five foot ten inch frame into one of the modern leather chairs in her Philadelphia office and her awkward adolescent self pops into view: one long leg splayed here, another there, her arms hanging loosey-goosey over the sides, fingertips grazing the floor. Or when she later will injure her hand in a boating accident and come to the group with a large white bandage wrapped around her authoritative index finger, chips in her wine-colored nail polish. Next to Coché is the last couple, Leigh and Aaron, who are in their early sixties. Couples contract to attend a year’s worth of sessions and may re-up at the end of the time; Leigh and Aaron have kept coming back far longer than anyone else in Coché’s nearly two decades of running couples groups. This is their tenth year—the typical stay is two, perhaps three years—and Aaron will preface many of his comments in the coming months with the cheerful declaration that this is it for him and Leigh. Leigh has agreed to that plan, but she doesn’t seem nearly as thrilled about it.

Now Leigh looks encouragingly at Clem as he explains that he didn’t understand that his wife wanted to put emotional intimacy before other things, before sex, that is. But now I’m thinking to myself, that’s great. Really. That’s great. Maybe I’ll just start sending you e-mails or calling you more, leaving notes, trying, trying, Clem stutters, to break through to that next level instead of just trying to be sexual first. It’ll be a good goal. It sounds fun even.

You’re open to it, Coché says. He sounds more than open, though; he sounds mildly enthusiastic.

From the bowels of her chair, Marie is watching. She is watching Clem, watching them figure it all out. They haven’t. Sometimes I just want to be heard and nothing more, she says, pleading in her voice, and finger wagging. Marie’s graying brown hair hangs to the middle of her back, and she wears it in a long side ponytail. Hair like that could be a girlish affectation in a middle-aged woman or a sign of indifference about her appearance. With forty-four-year-old Marie, I’ll come to believe, it’s both.

During the couple’s têteà-tête, Marie had not spelled out for Clem what she meant by emotional intimacy because, it seems, she herself doesn’t know what she means. But she knows that Clem’s translation, the soft seductions of notes and e-mails, isn’t right. What Marie seems to want him to absorb at this point is her inchoate dissatisfaction—with him, with life—her lack. If you’re already at the fix-it level, Marie complains, then you haven’t really heard me.

Say that again, Coché says, jumping off Clem’s train and onto Marie’s.

I would like to just express myself so that Clem would fully understand who I am.

That would be better than fixing it, Coché reiterates.

Yes, Marie agrees. But she doubts whether Clem will be able to merely listen.

Sometimes if I just listen, Clem says, like something straight out of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, "it seems like I didn’t do anything."

Try saying it this way, Coché coaches Clem. When I listen, I feel helpless.

When I listen, I feel helpless, Clem mimics. I feel like I’m not making any progress. I get anxious, so I try to fix it. As his momentum increases, it seems like he’s actually hearing what he’s saying, and he’s blinking as if he’s been punched. And that’s what I’ve done for the twenty years I’ve known you.

"Which ends up being that you don’t know me," Marie retorts.

"Oh, I think I do," Clem flares thinly. His introspective efforts have been turned against him. Before the squabble can continue, Coché breaks it up.

See, Marie says to Coché, you have to intervene. Earlier Marie was joking, grimly, that the therapist was going to have to come live with them because this is their second year with the group, and they still can’t apply what they learn here at home.

Clem tries again with Marie. So you say I don’t know you because I don’t listen, and I try to fix things?

Yes, Marie replies. Do you want me to take time to explain?

No, Coché cuts her off. I want to move on. She is reflecting, surely, the will of the group, who can become at times like a single organism; the creature sucked in its breath when Marie offered to take time to explain. She has a tendency to engage in what behavioral researchers who videotape couples in conflict call self summarizing—put less diplomatically, she repeats herself.

But the group, or rather Clem, is not going to get off that easy. Marie has some parting words for him. "I need for you to actively listen to me right now, she says. In addition to sharing information, the private one-on-one conversations are an opportunity for the couples to practice active listening, Coché has told them, meaning that the listener doesn’t challenge the speaker and checks in to make sure he or she understands what his or her partner is trying to communicate (What I hear you saying is . . ."). Coché knows so-called active listening has become a cultural joke, shorthand for everything that is silly about our overly therapized world, but she thinks the concept can be useful.

Phone calls, Marie goes on, "would not make me feel good." Clem protests that he knows, he knows . . . he knows his wife doesn’t like to talk on the phone.

Don’t call me, she says. Thank you for listening.

Okay. Clem’s tone is flat.

The offhand cruelty of this exchange is crushing (not to mention that it shows the limits of active listening; intention can matter as much as technique), but no one acknowledges it out loud in this, the first session. It’s not just that these people are still shy together, or already cowed by Marie (though they are both). Sometimes it will be disconcerting how suddenly the subject changes in the group, how quickly the onrush of voices blots out a wrenching spill. Which is similar to how the ceaseless domestic demands operate in marriage: the scheduling and the meal making and the bill paying sopping up the feeling, fortunately, perhaps.

This is probably the time to say a bit more about my own situation: I’ve lived with my husband for fourteen years, eleven of them married, and we have two daughters. My marriage, like many I know, has had its problems, its head-banging frustrations. And like many spouses, I’ve wondered how I could act, or react, differently, be it more constructively or simply more kindly, wondered how my husband and I might increase our allotment of peaceable—and passionate—coexistence.

I didn’t spend a year with the group, however, to voyeuristically enhance my own marriage. I knew I might take home some new insight, but the impetus for attending was professional: I wanted to combine an intimate look at wedded malaise with the fruits of my formal and informal study over the years of the psychology of relationships. Initially, I checked into shadowing therapists who counsel couples individually, but then it occurred to me that a group of husbands and wives would be ideal. I’d not only get to observe multiple subjects at once, but they’d be interacting among themselves, itself revealing.

While marriage therapy is very common, group marriage therapy is not. Still, with just a little googling, I tracked down a handful of candidate group therapists. I chose Coché for three practical reasons: She was relatively nearby; she reconfigures her group annually and was about to start a new round; and she seemed like a competent therapist. I gleaned the latter by checking her credentials and interviewing her and people who knew her work. I could tell by how she talked about therapy—the people she’d studied with, the way she conceptualized marital problems—that she was familiar with the dominant approaches of couples counseling. I also watched Coché conduct a mock therapy session at a conference, and I liked her style. She seemed like a good combination of intellectually curious and emotionally perspicacious.

Who would submit to a couples group? I would, because I come from a family where the mind is treated as something that may periodically need attention and care, just like the body. But many people can’t fathom it, and when I first met the couples, I was struck by how unprepossessing they were, at least on the surface. The five men and five women range in age from their mid-thirties to early sixties; several hold relatively high-powered or high-status jobs, the rest work in white-collar or retail middle management. About half of the group has been in therapy on and off for years, the others are fairly new to it. Three of the couples have children.

Coché culls clients for her groups from her conventional individual and couples therapy practice, as well as from referrals from colleagues. Groups are particularly helpful, she believes, for people who are rigid or keenly defensive, since the clamor of voices is harder to dismiss than a single, ever-so-reasonable therapist. Couples in which one spouse can barely speak up for herself are also prime candidates, she says: The meeker half will find a subgroup within the larger group to take his or her part. She excludes people who are seriously mentally ill, are of limited intelligence, or have some practical impediment to showing up every month. Coché also does not invite couples in which either spouse is having an affair, though there has been at least one instance, she says, when a man lied about it. (When anyone comes to her for marriage counseling, she asks straight out about adultery, if the subject doesn’t arise naturally.) Other times, Coché says, people have had flings during their year with the group, and the infidelities were then addressed.

Among the ground rules for the group, which Coché imparts in screening interviews and again during the first session, are that people commit for one year and that they not socialize outside of the sessions (which may precipitate all manner of upheaval if, for example, someone has a party and invites certain members but not others). Participants also must agree to meet with Coché or another therapist at least once between meetings, to assimilate what they’re learning and zero in on their own specific situations.

Coché started running couples groups in the mid-1980s with her then husband, Erich Coché, a German-born psychologist who’d made his reputation designing in-patient groups for the mentally ill. She was besotted with Erich, she says, from the moment they met. Will you have a hamburger? he asked, accosting her on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, where they both were attending a professional conference. (A colleague had told him this was the best way to ask an American girl for a date.) Only twenty-three years old, Judith was drawn to his European cosmopolitanism, his intellect, how different he was from anyone else she knew. On our second date, we went to the zoo, and then we spent the next year talking about how it was impossible to get married, she says. How could a Main Line only child of Jewish parents, some of whose family had been killed in the Holocaust, marry a Dutch German?

Their careers were intertwined from the start—she had her first published article, about a boy she treated who chronically soiled himself, translated into German. The pair wrote an academic book about couples groups and together led the group until Erich died, in 1991, at age forty-nine, a year after being diagnosed with cancer. He’s still a presence in her life—according to Erich Coché . . . she’ll say to the group—and just this morning, before the group began, she rummaged around in a coat closet and pulled out a picture of him. It had been lying facedown in a basket. She didn’t say anything, and it took me a split second to figure out who I was looking at. Then she returned the photograph to its place in the closet, facedown. Her second husband, John, whom she married in 1994, is a retired CEO in scientific publishing. She has one child, with Erich, a thirty-year-old daughter named Juliette, who is considering joining the family business. She is a psychiatric resident at the University of Pennsylvania—and took a required course on group therapy that her mother has taught there for years.

Although couples groups may be rare, professional-led groups for people with specific emotional or physical conditions are easy to find: Coché has run them for overweight adults and learning-disabled adolescents. And there is one kind of couples group that has registered on the national radar in the last decade: premarital education. Often run by religious organizations, the education groups were a darling of George W. Bush, whose administration funneled money to programs targeted at low-income couples who’d yet to tie the knot. The so-called marriage cure was intended to increase the wedding rate, the reasoning being that two-parent families are less likely to need welfare.

So what’s unusual are groups like Coché’s: ongoing, trafficking in emotion. (A brochure for one Bush-era couples-education seminar reassured, or warned, depending on your perspective: